How to Customize the Nexus Logo in Nexus Professional
Nexus Professional 1.5.0 ships with a simple branding plugin that makes it easy to add your own logo to the Nexus UI. In this post, you will learn how to install the Nexus Branding Plugin and how to configure Nexus to use your own custom logo.
Step 1: Create a custom logo. If you want to create a drop-in replacement for the default logo, create a 248×50 logo with a transparent background and save it as a PNG. In the video that accompanies this blog post, you’ll see that I have created a 248×50 transparent PNG that has the logo of a fictitious company named “myCorp++”. (more…)
Nexus Open Source or Professional: Which One is Right for You?
We’re frequently getting questions from users about the differences between Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional, and the standard response we give is:
“If you work for an organization that needs support or which needs staging and procurement, you’ll want to use Nexus Professional. If you are new to repository management, and you just want to evaluate the technology, download Nexus Open Source. If you find that you need support or enterprise features, it is easy enough to upgrade from OSS to Pro.”
I wanted to take this post as an opportunity to expand on that general answer and provide more specific use cases that would affect this decision (more…)
How to Control Nexus Groups with Effective Routing Rules
When you run a repository manager you will likely want to control which artifacts developers have access to. Maybe you also want to try to speed up your builds and reduce the time it takes to find and retrieve the artifacts needed in your build. You might be looking for an easy way to filter out junk artifacts that you don’t want to involve in your build. If you are trying to do any of these things, you’ll need to know how to configure routing rules in Nexus. In this blog post, I walk through routing rules and provide some answers for people interested in using routing rules to gain more control over repositories in Nexus. (more…)
Sonatype Nexus 1.4.1 introduces a plugin console and custom artifact metadata
Sonatype is pleased to announce the 1.4.1 release of both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional.
Nexus Open Source 1.4.1 Highlights
Nexus Plugin Console
Use the Nexus Plugin Console to list all installed Nexus plugins and browse REST services made available by installed Nexus Plugin. To open the Nexus Plugin Console, click on the Plugin Console link in the Administration section of the Nexus menu as shown in the following figure.
Nexus as Open Source Infrastructure: User Sign-Up
If you’ve ever participated in an open source community like the Apache Software Foundation or Codehaus, you’ll know that there are hundreds (sometimes thousands) of participants and interested parties for projects such as Maven, httpd, or Tomcat. Communities like these are only able to communicate because individuals can sign up for mailing lists, issues trackers, and other open source infrastructure without the manual intervention of an administrator. If you want to submit a bug to the Groovy project at Codehaus, you don’t have to send an email to someone asking permission to participate, you simply sign up for an account on the Codehaus JIRA. It just would be as agile a community if you need to wait for an administrator’s permission to participate.
It is this self-service sign-up capability that is a key feature of all scalable open-source infrastructure, and this is also one of the key features that was just released in Nexus Professional (which is also freely available for any interested open source project).
Bringing Open Source to the Enteprise
While this self-service sign-up is important for open source projects, it can also be something useful to the enterprise. Many large software development organizations have realized that the collaborative, open-source development model provides an example for internal development. If an organization can emulate the ad-hoc, merit-driven models of something like the Apache Software Foundation, they can start to gain some of the benefits of open source culture and open source community. I’ve spoken with many executives at large organizations who understand that they need to find a way to bring the “ethos” of open-source into the enterprise. One way to encourage this change is to start using the same infrastructure as open source projects: Nexus, JIRA, Subversion. Another way to bring open-source best practices into the enterprise is to allow for more ad-hoc, user-driven action. Give your developers something like Nexus, and don’t put an administrator in the way. Let them sign up for accounts using the User Account Plugin.
In this post, I provide a brief overview of user-driven sign-up feature just released with Nexus Professional 1.4.0.
